He replied that there didn't seem to be any organized effort from the state to get people shots -- maybe the country of 6 million had inoculated 3000 people. He didn't know where they'd been getting the vaccine -- it was a discussion that was so remote from his reality that he seemed not to have much thought about it.
What came to my mind immediately was that, if Nicaragua and other poor Latin American countries were ever going to get vaccines, they would probably be looking to Cuba. Cuba has historically shared medical resources with Nicaragua. The Caribbean island has a developed biotech industry and a history of assisting other impoverished nations.
And so I wasn't surprised to run across this from the Washington Post:
Cuban leader Fidel Castro vowed to build a biotech juggernaut in the Caribbean, advancing the idea in the early 1980s with six researchers in a tiny Havana lab. Forty years later, the communist island nation could be on the cusp of a singular breakthrough: Becoming the world’s smallest country to develop not just one, but multiple coronavirus vaccines.
... Cuban officials say they’re developing cheap and easy-to-store serums. They are able to last at room temperature for weeks, and in long-term storage as high as 46.4 degrees, potentially making them a viable option for low-income, tropical countries that have been pushed aside by bigger, wealthier nations in the international scrum for coronavirus vaccines.
They could also make Cuba the pharmacist for nations lumped by Washington into the “Axis of Evil” and “Troika of Tyranny.” Iran and Venezuela have inked vaccine deals with Havana. Iran has agreed to host a Phase 3 trial of one of Cuba’s most promising candidates — Soberana 2 — as part of a technology transfer agreement that could see millions of doses manufactured in Iran. ...
This article treats Cuba as an unreconstructed authoritarian hell-hole. Now there's certainly plenty wrong with Cuba for Cubans. But let's credit the Cuban project with understanding that health care is a right, not a commodity. We in the United States have nothing to brag about while we defend the patents held by rich world pharmaceutical companies against the international effort to make life-saving shots cheap and accessible around the world.
Meanwhile scientists with a big picture view warn that rich world indifference and corporate greed might mean that mutations render the first wave of coronavirus vaccines obsolete within a year if we're too cheap to make sure protection reaches everyone, everywhere.
The grim forecast of a year or less comes from two-thirds of respondents, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organisations including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and UNAIDS, who carried out the survey of 77 scientists from 28 countries. Nearly one-third of the respondents indicated that the time-frame was likely nine months or less.
Persistent low vaccine coverage in many countries would make it more likely for vaccine-resistant mutations to appear, said 88% of the respondents, who work across illustrious institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Yale, Imperial College, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the University of Edinburgh.
“New mutations arise every day. Sometimes they find a niche that makes them more fit than their predecessors. These lucky variants could transmit more efficiently and potentially evade immune responses to previous strains,” said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University, in a statement.
“Unless we vaccinate the world, we leave the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could churn out variants that could evade our current vaccines and require booster shots to deal with them.”
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